How Medellin and Mexico City compare on cost, visas, working hours, weather, internet and safety. Every figure comes from our city guides and tools, checked and dated there.
Dollars and pounds at today's exchange rate. Download speeds are the typical figure from each guide, which says where it comes from: some are for the city, some for the whole country, so treat a small gap as no gap.
Rent, a coworking desk, a cheap lunch on each of 22 working days, and getting around: the same four costs our budget calculator uses. The rent figures aren't always the same kind of figure (some are furnished one-beds, some are averages across every size of flat), so read the note under each.
$1,080 to $2,110£810 to £1,580 a month
$933 to $1,460£701 to £1,100 a month
Visa V Nomada Digital
The catch. The bar is pinned to the minimum wage, so it moves every January. The 2026 wage survived a court challenge in July, though a final ruling is still due.
Residente Temporal, economic solvency
The catch. Every consulate prints its own figure. Check the sheet for the one you will apply at, and apply before you travel: it cannot be done inside Mexico.
See where your own income stands in every country. Check your income
A 9am to 5pm day in the employer's city, shown in local time, for today's date, so it allows for the clocks changing.
Different hours or another employer city? Use the time-zone planner
The average high in °C each month, coloured by the rule on our best-time page: green is a high of 20 to 32°C with under 150mm of rain; red is a high of 38°C or more or under 12°C, 250mm of rain or more, or 33°C or more with 150mm of rain or more. Hover over a month for its rain.
| City | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Medellin | 28° | 28° | 28° | 28° | 28° | 28° | 29° | 29° | 28° | 27° | 27° | 27° |
| Mexico City | 22° | 24° | 26° | 28° | 27° | 26° | 25° | 25° | 24° | 24° | 23° | 22° |
Medellin: seasons and events · Mexico City: seasons and events
Level 3: reconsider travel
Level 2: increased caution
The US level is for the whole country, as the State Department sets it, and some countries have stricter advice for particular regions.
From each city guide, word for word.
You want a city where the weather stops being a variable — 21 to 22 degrees every month, no heating, no air conditioning, no seasonal reckoning — and where a genuinely good metro means you never need a car. It suits asynchronous or US-facing work, because UTC-5 with no clock changes is the cleanest overlap with North America you will find down here. And it suits anyone who will actually learn Spanish, because the reward curve is steep: the difference between the Poblado bubble at 3.3 million pesos a month and real Medellin at 2.3 is mostly linguistic.
You are expecting the Instagram version. This is a Spanish-speaking city with the English proficiency of a country ranked 76th in the world, and every interaction that matters happens at a counter with a queue. It rains on twenty-five days in October. The nomad visa is a two-year cul-de-sac that leads nowhere near residency, the income bar jumped 23 per cent overnight because it is pinned to the minimum wage, and citizenship got harder rather than easier. And be clear-eyed about the crime: the murder rate is a third of the national average and falling, but El Poblado and Laureles are first and second in the city for drug-assisted robbery, with 428 cases by August against 227 in all of 2025. Both the British and American governments say so in writing.
You have functional Spanish or a real intention to get it, you earn in dollars or pounds, and you want a genuine city rather than a nomad compound. If you can show roughly 80,000 to 84,000 pesos a month on paper you get a four-year residency route with a five-year path to a passport, which is unusually generous. Live in Juarez or San Rafael rather than Condesa and you pay about a third of Condesa rent for the same commute. Buy a desk instead of pretending cafes work, and the infrastructure holds up fine.
You want a cheap, clean, easy city. The air was officially clean on 15 days out of 273 this year. You will live 2,240 metres up, which flattens people for a fortnight. The British government tells you not to hail taxis, not to use street ATMs and not to leave your drink, in a city where 59.8 per cent of adults already feel unsafe. Take the obvious flat in Roma or Condesa and you are on the soft lakebed where 2017 shook fifty times harder than firm ground, in the exact building height that fell, in the neighbourhoods where hundreds marched in July 2025 to tell foreigners to leave. Their complaint is arithmetically correct: Cuauhtemoc rents rose 13.7 per cent in a year against a 3.69 per cent cap that protects everyone except the newcomer.
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